1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for scheduling transmission of data packets, and more particularly to an apparatus and method for allocating the resources of multiple channels to a plurality of mobile stations in a multichannel wireless communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
Radio resources management is implemented to effectively manage and use the radio resources in a mobile communication system for providing multimedia services together with high-speed data transmission. The scheduling of the transmission of data packets is essential for radio resources management, for which has been typically used the PF (Proportional Fair) scheduler. This scheduler considers both system yield rate and fair distribution of the resources among the users in an environment of radio channels varying with time and users. However, the PF scheduler does not consider quality of service (QoS). In order to consider QoS, the M-LWDF (Modified Largest Weighted Delay First) scheduler has been proposed. However, this scheduler cannot satisfy the system throughput versus QoS trade-off. Furthermore, both the PF scheduler and M-LWDF scheduler operate for a single channel.
Alternatively, there have been proposed the sub-channel allocation algorithms of the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) system, for managing the radio resources in considering multiple channels. This is to deduce the data rate allocated to each mobile station for each frame by using a separate algorithm. However, problems in combining with the packet scheduler arise in this method, which adversely affects both system throughput and QoS since the QoS must be considered frame by frame.